Brilliant Blunders: How the Big Bang Beat Out the Steady State Universe

On March 28, 1949, at 6:30 in the evening, astrophysicist Fred Hoyle gave one of his authoritative radio lectures on The Third Programme, a cultural broadcast on the BBC’s that featured such intellectuals as philosopher Bertrand Russell and playwright Samuel Beckett. At one point, as he was trying to contrast his own scenario—one of continuous creation of matter in the universe—with the opposing theory, which claimed that the universe had a distinct and definite beginning, Hoyle made what was to become a controversial statement:

We now come to the question of applying the observational tests to earlier theories. These theories were based on the hypothesis that all the matter in the universe was created in one big bang at a particular time in the remote past[emphasis added]. It now turns out that in some respect or other all such theories are in conflict with the observational requirements.

This lecture marked the birth of the term “big bang,” which has since been inextricably attached to the initial event from which our universe sprouted. Contrary to popular belief, Hoyle did not use the term in a derogatory manner. Rather, he was simply attempting to create a mental picture for his listeners.

Hoyle’s most enduring works were in the areas of nuclear astrophysics and stellar evolution. Yet most of those who remember him from his popular books and prominent radio programs know him as a cosmologist and co-originator of the idea of a steady state universe. (The steady state model predicted that galaxies that are billions of light-years away should look, statistically speaking, just like nearby galaxies, even though we see the former as they were billions of years ago because of the time it takes their light to reach us.)

He started from the observational fact that the universe is expanding. This immediately raised a question: If galaxies are continuously rushing away from each other, does that mean that space is becoming more and more empty? Hoyle answered with a categorical no. Instead, he proposed, matter is continually being created throughout space so that new galaxies and clusters of galaxies are constantly being formed at a rate that compensates precisely for the dilution caused by the cosmic expansion. In this way, Hoyle reasoned, the universe is preserved in a steady state. He once commented wittily, “Things are the way they are because they were the way they were.”

The idea of matter being continuously created out of nothing may appear crazy at first. However, as Hoyle was quick to point out, no one knew where matter had appeared from in the big bang cosmology, either. The only difference, he explained, was that in the big bang scenario all the matter was created in one explosive beginning, while in the steady state model matter has been created at a constant rate throughout an infinite time and is still being created at the same rate today. Hoyle contended that the concept of continuous creation of matter (when put in the context of a specific theory) was much more attractive than creation of the universe in the remote past, since the latter implied that observable effects had arisen from “causes unknown to science.”

The big bang and steady state models made distinctly different predictions about the distant universe. When we observe galaxies that are billions of light-years away, we get a picture of those galaxies as they were billions of years ago. In a continuously evolving universe (the big bang model), this means that we observe that particular part of the universe when it was younger and therefore different. In the steady state model, on the other hand, the universe has always existed in the same state. Consequently, the remote parts of the universe are expected to have precisely the same appearance as the local cosmic environment.

The first signs of trouble for the steady state model came not from optical telescopes but from radio astronomy. One of the pioneers in this endeavor was a physicist from the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge: Martin Ryle.

Unlike Hoyle, whose father was a wool and textiles merchant, Ryle came from a privileged background—his father was physician to King George VI—and he had received the best of what private education could offer. After some pioneering radio observations of the Sun in the late 1940s, Ryle and his group embarked on an ambitious program to detect radio sources beyond the solar system. Following some impressive improvements to the observational techniques that allowed them to discard background radiation from the Milky Way, Ryle and his colleagues discovered several dozen “radio stars” distributed more or less isotropically across the sky. Unfortunately, since most of the sources did not have visible counterparts, there was no way to determine their distances precisely.

Ryle began picking apart the steady state model by evaluating one of its testable predictions—that distant parts of the universe should look exactly the same as the local cosmic environment. He started to collect a large sample of radio sources, and to count how many of them there were at different intensity intervals. Since he had no way of knowing the actual distances to most sources (they were beyond the detection range of optical telescopes), Ryle made the simplest assumption: namely, that the observed weaker radio sources were, on average, more distant than the sources of the strong signals. He found that there were dramatically more weak sources than strong ones. In other words, it seemed that the density of sources at distances of billions of light-years (and therefore representing the universe billions of years ago) was much higher than the current density nearby. This was clearly at odds with a model of a never-changing universe, but it could be made consistent with a cosmos evolving from a big bang, if one assumed (correctly, as we now recognize) that galaxies were more prone to emit intense radio signals in their youth than at present, in their older age.

By the early 1960s, Ryle’s group had at its disposal even an entirely new radio observatory, funded by the Mullard electronics company. By then, Ryle and Hoyle had become engaged in a series of intellectual skirmishes, culminating in one particularly unpleasant incident. Hoyle later described this traumatic experience in his autobiographical book Home Is Where the Wind Blows. It all started with what appeared to be an innocent phone call from the Mullard company in early 1961. The person at the other end of the line invited Hoyle and his wife to attend a press conference at which Ryle was expected to present new results that were supposed to be of great interest to Hoyle. When they arrived at the Mullard headquarters in London, Hoyle’s wife, Barbara, was escorted to a seat in the front now, while Hoyle was led to a chair on stage, facing the media. He had no doubt that the announcement would be related to the counting of radio sources according to their intensity, but he couldn’t believe that he would have been invited if the results were to contradict the steady state theory.

Unfortunately, what Hoyle found utterly unthinkable did happen. When Ryle appeared, rather than making a brief announcement, as advertised, he launched into a technical, jargon-filled lecture on the results of his larger, fourth survey. He finished by claiming confidently that the results now showed unambiguously a higher density of radio sources in the past, therefore proving the steady state theory wrong. The shocked Hoyle was merely asked to comment on the results. Incredulous and humiliated, he barely mumbled a few sentences and rushed away from the event. The media frenzy that followed in the subsequent days disgusted Hoyle to the point that he avoided phone calls for a week and was absent even from the following Royal Astronomical Society meeting on February 10. Even Ryle realized that the press conference had crossed the border of common decency. He called Hoyle to apologize, adding that when he agreed to the Mullard event, he “had no idea how bad it would be.”

On the purely scientific front, however, despite these disturbing failures in etiquette, Ryle’s arguments grew increasingly compelling, and by the mid-1960s, the vast majority of the astronomical community agreed that the proponents of the steady state theory had lost the battle.

The discovery of extremely active galaxies, in which the accretion of mass onto central, supermassive black holes releases sufficient radiation to outshine the entire galaxy, cemented the evidence against a steady state universe. These objects, known as quasars, were luminous enough to be observed by optical telescopes. The observations allowed astronomers to use Hubble’s law to determine the distance to these sources, and to show convincingly that quasars were indeed more common in the past than at present. There was no escape from the conclusion that the universe was evolving and that it had been denser in the past. At that point, the floodgates opened, and the challenges to the steady state model kept pouring in.

In spite of Hoyle’s valiant efforts, beginning in the mid-1960s most scientists stopped paying attention to the steady state theory. Hoyle’s continuing attempts to demonstrate that all the confrontations between the theory and emerging observations could be explained away looked increasingly contrived and implausible. Worse yet, he seemed to have lost that “fine judgment” that he had once advocated, which was supposed to distinguish him from “merely becoming a crackpot.” Even as late as the year 2000, at the age of 85, he published a book entitled A Different Approach to Cosmology: From a Static Universe Through the Big Bang Towards Reality, in which he and his collaborators, Jayant Narlikar and Geoff Burbidge, explained the details of the quasi–steady state theory and their objections to the big bang. To express their contemptuous opinion of the scientific establishment, they presented in one of the book’s pages a photograph of a flock of geese walking on a dirt road with the caption, “This is our view of the conformist approach to the standard (hot big bang) cosmology. We have resisted the temptation to name some of the leading geese.” Perhaps the best thing said about the book appeared in the review by Britain’s Sunday Telegraph, and it referred not so much to the contents of the book as to Hoyle’s fiery personality: “Hoyle systematically reviews the evidence for the Big Bang theory, and gives it a good kicking . . . it’s hard not to be impressed with the audacity of the demolition job . . . I can only hope that I possess one- thousandth of Hoyle’s fighting spirit when I, like him, have reached my 85th year.”

Hoyle’s blunder was in his apparently pigheaded, almost infuriating refusal to acknowledge the theory’s demise even as it was being smothered by accumulating contradictory evidence, and in his use of asymmetrical criteria of judgment with respect to the big bang and steady state theories. What was it that caused this intransigent behavior?

A few statements made by Hoyle himself provide the best evidence. In Home Is Where the Wind Blows, he wrote the following striking paragraph:

The problem with the scientific establishment goes back to the small hunting parties of prehistory. It must then have been the case that, for a hunt to be successful, the entire party was needed. With the direction of prey uncertain, as the direction of the correct theory in science is initially uncertain, the party had to make a decision about which way to go, and then they all had to stick to the decision, even if it was merely made at random. The dissident who argued that the correct direction was precisely opposite from the chosen direction had to be thrown out of the group, just as the scientist today who takes a view different from the consensus finds his papers rejected by journals and his applications for research grants summarily dismissed by state agencies. Life must have been hard in pre-history, for the more a hunting party found no prey in its chosen direction, the more it had to continue in that direction, for to stop and argue would be to create uncertainty and to risk differences of opinion breaking out, with the group then splitting disastrously apart. This is why the first priority among scientists is not to be correct but for everybody to think the same way. It is this perhaps instinctive primitive motivation that creates the establishment.

One can hardly imagine a stronger advocacy for dissent from mainstream science. Hoyle echoes here the words of the influential second-century physician Galen of Pergamum: “From my very youth I despised the opinion of the multitude and longed for truth and knowledge, believing that there was for man no possession more noble or divine.” However, as Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal for Britain, has pointed out, isolation has its price. Science progresses not in a straight line from A to B but in a zigzag path shaped by critical reevaluation and faultfinding interaction. The continuous evaluation provided by the scientific establishment that Hoyle so despised is what creates the checks and balances that keep scientists from straying too far in the wrong direction. By imposing upon himself academic isolation, Hoyle denied himself these corrective forces.

I have noted several times that the idea of a steady state universe was brilliant at the time it was proposed. In retrospect, the steady state universe, with its continuous creation of matter, shares many features with currently fashionable models of an inflationary universe: the conjecture that the cosmos experienced a faster-than-light growth spurt when it was a fraction of a second old. In some respects, the steady state universe is simply a universe in which inflation always occurs.

Hoyle’s brilliance was also revealed in the fact that he belonged to that small group of scientists capable of investigating two mutually inconsistent theories in parallel. In spite of continuing to hold out against the big bang for his entire life, Hoyle actually contributed important studies to big bang nucleosyntheses, in particular concerning the cosmic helium abundance and the synthesis of elements at very high temperatures. Hoyle’s theories, even when eventually proven wrong, were always dynamizing, and they unfailingly energized entire fields and catalyzed new ideas.

Mario Livio

Dr. Mario Livio is an internationally renowned astrophysicist, a best-selling author, and a popular speaker.
He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
He has published more than 400 scientific papers on topics ranging from dark energy and cosmology to black holes and extrasolar planets.
Dr Livio is also the author of five popular science books, including "The Golden Ratio" (an International Bestseller for which he received the "Peano Prize" and the "International Pythagoras Prize") and "Is God A Mathematician?” — which was the basis for the 2016 Emmy-nominated NOVA program “The Great Math Mystery."
Livio's most recent book, "Brilliant Blunders," was a national bestseller in the U.S., and was selected by the Washington Post as one of the "Best Books of the Year.” His upcoming book, "WHY? What Makes Us Curious" will appear in July 2017.

According to the new hypothesis, the geometric interpretation of the Lorentz’s radical says that the Big Bang happened in an incredible way. If the speed of light in the universe is maximal, a new hypothesis explains that the Big Bang is the cause of the collision of galaxies with the speed of light.

Many theories suggest that when the intergalactic speed reaches the speed of light, then the universe is maximally expanded. But a new hypothesis about the universe talks back. When we think that the universe is maximally expanded, it is actually maximally compressed, the galaxies are in a singular state and at this moment they collide with the speed of light. The Big Bang is a result of the collision of galaxies with the speed of light.

This is not mentioned in any theory of the Big Bang yet. This is an extraordinary idea with the proof.

If we prove that the speed of light in the universe is finite and it is the fastest one, as a theory of relativity says, while a new hypothesis about the structure of the universe says that the big bang really happened and it happened by an incredible way.

Making sure you aren’t doomed is not an occupation.
The static universe is completely and utterly incoherent. In all of 3 seconds any logical human cannot deduce that an infinite past is absurd and impossible.

So how is that Einstein himself fudged his theory to allow for it? BIAS. If these atheists who entered the fields of origins weren’t so obsessed in denying a creator they wouldn’t have wasted all these years on theories that do nothing for mankind.

Think of the advances that could have been made if their time were spent on solving hunger or energy problems instead of compulsively trying to make sure there isnt a Creator.

Its all worthless, self flagellating pride. They care more about selling books about how God isnt necessary than trying to solve real problems. Clap clap clap…your life has been a waste of time .

Doctor Who

This article is about the Big Bang. Not religion. It seems you are as ignorant as the PTL.

Big Bang theory today fits very well into what Imre Lakatos descibed as a ‘degenerating research programme’. It started as a hypothesis and was confirmed by a chance finding, Penzias and Wilson discovering the cosmic background radiation. It did not make any major prediction, but just a few small ones. However in order to survive it had to adopt improbable ad hoc hypotheses such as inflation and dark energy. Originally creation ex nihilo was the major flaw in the steady state theory; today it is seen as ‘natural fact’. Old brillant blunders could remind us that the present is still rushing into the past.

Doctor Who

The Big Bang Happened. a century of science has only confirmed it more.

The big bang is finally losing favor. A recent article (Feb 9, 2015) in physics.org is titled “No Big Bang? Quantum equation predicts universe has no beginning.” Maybe Fred was right and Mario Livio is just another big bang propagandists.

This week, NASA announced that it will partner with the European Space Agency to send a 4,760-pound spacecraft into space to peer out over billions of galaxies in an effort to map and measure the universe. Its purpose: to investigate the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy.

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